Category Archives: Literature

How Bodies Read and Write: Dostoevsky’s Demons and Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg

Michael Kochin wrote a chapter in the 2013 book, Dostoevsky’s Political Thought: The writer must give up his soul in order to write. He must give up his soul to become the body writing. To write Stavrogin, then, the writer … Continue reading

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The Secret Life of John le Carre

Adam Sisman writes in this 2023 book: * David claimed that these extramarital relationships were ‘impulsive, driven, short – lived affairs . . . often meaningless in themselves’, but while that might be true of some of them, others appear … Continue reading

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Reading Against the Novel

Tim Parks writes for the July 18, 2024 edition of NYBooks.com: In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel’s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant … Continue reading

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The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Mark McGurl writes in this 2011 book: …the creative writing program produces… a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society. …Postwar American literature provides endless testimony, for starters, of the agonizing importance of the institution of the family in making … Continue reading

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Larry McMurtry’s Struggle Against Anti-Gentile Prejudice

Here’s an excerpt from the new biography, Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty: She [McMurtry’s literary agent Dorothea Oppenheimer] gave [Editor Michael Korda] an earful about how East Coast reviewers just didn’t get McMurtry though to be fair he … Continue reading

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